Naff Bridget Prentice podcast, praising the joys of Lewisham East (she's not naff, but the interviewer makes the whole thing a bit embarassing - like some sort of 1980s 'key kidz! politics is kool!' thing) (MP3 link)

Sylvia Pankhurst and the House of LordsThere is a campaign to put a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst, the great suffragette leader and radical campaigner, on College Green in Westminster, outside the House of Lords. This is being resisted by the reactionary old codgers in the Lords. Here’s the Guardian report:‘The words "Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee" do not have a ring of militant fervor, and yet to achieve its aims, members may need to adopt some of the tactics of its namesake. The Lords Administration and Works Committee - a bunch of hereditary male peers - has refused to allow a statue of the pioneering suffragette to be erected in Westminster. For those who believe that Pankhurst was the greatest feminist of her generation, this is an insult to the sisterhood.’Sylvia is someone I massively admire (when I added the “heroes” section to my link list over to the right earlier this year, I made sure to include her), so you might expect me to support this campaign. New Labour MP Vera Baird says ‘”Sylvia was the greatest democrat of all the suffragettes... "The statue should stand near to the parliament she worked and suffered for. It is a disgrace that these unelected peers fail to see what pride and inspiration women would get from such a great memorial."’ In fact, I think that it is an insult to a woman who had nothing but scorn for the parliamentary system. This is the woman Lenin wrote his dirty little pamphlet “Left-Wing Communism: an infantile disorder” about, attacking her for refusing to subordinate her unruly East End movement to the Labour Party’s parliamentarism. Her break with the official suffragette movement led by her mother and sister was partly about her disillusion the narrow, parliamentary conception of democracy that animated the official suffragettes. She didn’t work and suffer for parliament; she worked and suffered against it. Her mainly working class organisation, the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELF), soon renamed itself the Workers Suffrage Federation and later the Workers Socialist Federation. (She broke with her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel’s WSPU because of their support for terrorism – an arson campaign – which Sylvia saw as fundamentally undemocratic.) During World War I, ELF’s newspaper took on the controversial name The Women’s Dreadnought, later changed to Workers’ Dreadnought. Most of the suffragette leaders agreed to put their campaigning on hold for the duration of the war and threw their weight behind the national effort. In contrast, Sylvia Pankhurst and her East London comrades campaigned against the imperialist war. The Dreadnought was strongly supportive of refugees and asylum-seekers in Britain. In August 1914, when war was breaking out, the Woman’s Dreadnought wrote on “the unfortunate plight of Germans and other foreigners who are in England at this time. We in East London know that many of these people have lived with us as friendly neighbours for years. Some of them are political refugees, who, because they have dared to try to get reforms in their own autocratically governed countries, have been obliged to fly here for safety. Let us preserve our self-control at this trying time, and endeavour to see that these people are not to bear the blame of the wrongs which are being done in this war.”This passage is very characteristic of the politics of the Dreadnought. Defence of asylum is based less on the liberal ideology of rights than on a humanist politics of neighbourliness, empathy and everyday life, and a down to earth appeal to an East End “neighbourhood nationalism” or “militant particularism”.Pankhurst’s support for asylum rights – which emerged from a radical liberal context – took on a new place in her political thought as she rapidly shifted towards a communist position. This shift can be narrated through her immersion in the East End, both in the world of white working class women in areas like Bow (where she lived) and Hoxton, and in the world of the Jewish community. She lived with a shoe-making family named the Paynes in Bow from 1909; her circle of close friends were working class women like Charlotte Drake, ex-barmaid, labourer’s wife and mother of five, Melvina Walker, ex-ladies’ maid and docker’s wife, and Mrs Cresswell, mother of six and wife of a paint factory worker. Her day to day engagement with the life-struggles of working class people reconfigured her politics from a liberal grammar of rights to an orientation to material needs: housing issues, food supply issues, workplace issues. The ELF’s opposition to the war was focused on the politics of everyday life, not on abstract pacifist principles. They campaigned against food rationing, organized rent strikes and called for the commandeering of empty homes for the newly homeless. Pankhurst initially welcomed the 1917 revolutions in Russia. Her close links with Russian refugee activists in London meant she was well informed about the flowering of freedom from Tsarist dictatorship and the subsequent spontaneous emergence of new forms of working class democracy. But from a very early date, she came to distrust Lenin and his methods, and refused to align her movement with the newly formed Communist Party in Britain. She saw Lenin’s essentially authoritarian and anti-working class character very early on. From the 1920s, tiring of her struggle with Leninism, she devoted most of her energy to fighting that other great evil of the twentieth century, fascism. With her much younger Italian lover, Silvio Corio, she opened a tearoom in Woodford and had a son, Richard. They organised solidarity with the resistance to Mussolini’s dictatorship and then fought against the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia. After Corio's death Pankhurst settled in Addis Ababa with her son. She died there in 1960, passing away from coronary thrombosis during her regular nap one September afternoon. She was buried in a place reserved for the heroes of Ethiopia, the Emperor, Haile Sellassie, attending the ceremony. Links: Sylvia Pankhurst - Suffragette and class fighter, Libcom Library Panhkurst pages, Socialist History Project: Communists and the Labour Party, Anarchist Communism in Britain, The Movement for Workers Councils in Britain, German/Dutch Communist Left (scroll down for Syliva).File under:heroes of freedomTags: feminism, ultra-left, radical history, anti-fascism

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

I don't know enough to take any sort of authoratative position, but I believe that democracy is about more than the quantitative - the numerical count of votes. For democracy to be meaningful, dissent, difference and debate must be able to flourish. Jonathan Steele, one of the Grauniad's liberal foreign affairs infoolectuals thinks that Uncle Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, has basically been given a bad press by the evil right-wing cabal who control the Western press and the opposition to him is funded by the CIA and therefore meaningless. Lukashenko may be a control freak, Steele says, but the people are happy and economic progress is being made.

This is the logic of the liberal fellow traveller. Stalin may have been guilty of a few excesses, the fellow traveler logic goes, but he put bread on the table; there was full employment. (A parallel logic, not uncommon on the Tory far right, is that Hitler may have been a little nasty but at least he got the trains running on time and tried to do something for his country.)

"It is important to recognize that Steele is not denying the relevant facts concerning the atrocities committed in Darfur. He is systematically misrepresenting them by whitewashing the actions of the Janjaweed, and the government that it serves. He is misconstruing these actions as the unfortunate side effects of a clash between competing regional and social groups in the area, rather than as a deliberate campaign of mass violence that the government is waging against part of its own population. This is a particularly grotesque instance of the sort of propaganda journalism that runs rampant in the Guardian, as well as several other parts of the British press."

Paul Bogdanor goes further, and lists Steele with a list of "left-wing deniers", putting him on a par with Holocaust deniers. (BevanKieran, at a comment here, goes even further, but you can find his choice words yourself.) Meanwhile, who supports him? The SWP's most prolific blogger.

ML1 has kindly taken the time to write some lengthy comments on my previous post about the March for Free Expression this weekend. I should clarify my position. I believe that we should ruthlessly criticise religions where we believe they contribute to oppression or ignorance. I support the Enlightenment principle of free inquiry. I do not, however, believe that freedom of speech is an inalienable right that should be put above all others. I do not, for example, support the “right” of fascists to publish racist and anti-semitic material. I don’t want the state to intervene to stop fascists publishing racist and anti-semitic material – I don’t support censorship. But I am never going to make any effort whatsoever to defend fascists from censorship, as Chomsky has done for example. I see free speech fundamentalism – the placing of free speech above all other rights, seeing it as an inalienable, sacred principle – as ultra-liberal ideology. I have a problem, too, with some of the rhetoric coming from certain types of secularists, including Christopher Hitchens, which sees all religion as bad, period. I am not religious, but I think that religion – even Islam – can add something to political debates in a public sphere based on respect and tolerance. So, while I want to join the fight against Islamist totalitarianism, disrespect and intolerance, I do not want to be conscripted into a war against Islam – or religion – in general. The Danish cartoons are hard for me to call because I am not sure really that they were in the spirit of criticizing Islam(ism) for its totalitarian tendency. Looking at the cartoons, they actually strike me as gratuitous, infantile and possibly racist attacks on Islam as such. They do not make a responsible contribution to any debate. That is why I am glad no British publisher actually published them. So, as the Danish cartoons were the starting point of the current campaign for free expression, I am not sure I want to endorse the campaign, even though I sympathise with its aims and am clearly on its side (in a “with us or against us” kind of way).

“Next Saturday at 2pm in Trafalgar Square, there will be a rally for freedom of expression. I think it's fair to say that previous generations would be astonished that their descendants would have to take to the streets to demand such a basic right, but after the death threats against cartoonists, it seems we do.Fortunately, the British National Party is nowhere to be seen and the rally will be filled with democratic leftists, Liberal Democrats, secularists and Iranian and Saudi Arabian dissidents.With the white far right out of the picture, the brown far right has barged in and Islamic fundamentalists are proposing to hold demonstrations against free speech away from central London. So, if you want to protest on Saturday, you have a choice: for free speech or against? Come on, it's not that hard a choice. All will be welcome in Trafalgar Square. Dress? Danish.”

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As if we need more reasons to fight against the new totalitarianism, read this on the Afghan theocrats: capital punishment for choosing the wrong faith (via LGFWatch). But for food for thought about getting into bed with the wrong allies in the fight on the new totalitarianism, read this on Theo Van Gogh (also via LGFWatch).

Russia: Bolsheviks stage final bloody assault on rebellious Kronstadt sailors. Kronstadt put Trotsky in power & Trotsky has squashed Kronstadt, shot its rebels like partidges. He has earned the sobriquet, the "Red Butcher".

Then I noticed similar posts to other sites, often contrasting David Irving's treatment, say, or putting 'anti-semitic' in scare quotes. I became aware that a whole conspiracy theory has built up around Rose (or 'Rose' as they prefer to call him - today's fascists tend to be liberal with quotation marks). He is a Zionist, a Mossad agent, a friend of 'Jewish extremist' Daniel Pipes*, an agent of the Project for the New American Century, etc etc.

Commieprof James Petras, Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, for example, asks "How is the Israeli secret service, Mossad, implicated in provoking the Western-Islamic/Arab conflict, and how do the consequences measure up to their expectations?", noting that Rose "has close working relations with the Israeli state (and in particular the far right Likud regime)". This is the mild version, and I won't link to the more extreme versions, because I don't link to fascist websites, even when they masquerade as leftist, anti-Islamophobic or New Age websites.

An illustration, as if we needed another, of the horrid convergence between sections of the left and the far right, brought together by a common hatred of Zionism. Or should that be 'Zionism'?

An illutration, too, of what is wrong with free speech fundamentalism - the idea that you should defend anyone's right to free speech, even libelous fascists.

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An interesting side angle: Wikipedia has been one of the battlegrounds of the struggle. The biographical data that asserts Rose is of Jewish origin, and taken as the evidence for Rose's Mossad links, appeared on Wikipedia, with no real evidence, and then dissappeared when sensible wiki-people took action. (See Judeopundit.) This illustrates one of the problems with letting ordinary folk like us write reference books.

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* Added my own scare quotes around 'Jewish extremist' to make intended irony apparent. A google search for "jewish extremist daniel pipes" throws up 47 hits, many from David Duke's website.

At the same time, though, I am not wholly in favour. I do not think that free expression is an unalienable right. Like the Chief Rabbi and Tariq Ramadan, I believe in responsible speech. I believe we need to cultivate a form of civic behaviour based on respect, including respect for religion. I don't want anyone stopping the Danish cartoons getting published, for example, but I don't really want them published and don't feel moved to march for them.

So I think I won't be joining any bloggers' get-together for the march, flattered as I am to be asked. But another Axis of Bob member, Richard of Bagrec, is.

There are some people who cannot see a conspiracy without Jews behind it, others who cannot see a society without emphasising racial discrimination. There are also those who cannot see a Muslim without talking about terrorism / ‘Islamo-fundo-krypto-stupido-fascism’, and the ones who make it their business to scream Islamophobia at every given opportunity.

Where would we be without these career agitators who would have nothing to do with their lives if the world was a happy place? A lot better off, that’s for sure.

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P.S.So, Alan Johnson and Jane Ashworth of Democratiya/LFIQ have pulled out from the march, not liking the fact that Nazi fellow-travellers the Freedom Association are involved. AWL are also cautioning against it. Fuel for the ex-WRP uber-leftists at IslamophobiaWatch. Make up your own mind! (By the way: great new issue of Democratiya now out, featuring Andre Glucksmann, Oliver Kamm and others.)

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

I am too busy at the moment to blog properly, not even to produce the quick links that I've been managing lately. What better way to take the opportunity of this hiatus than to go back to some of the posts you probably didn't read because they are too long. Posts like:

Friday, March 10, 2006

"France faces a problem with its Muslim population, but it is not the problem it generally assumes. The October-November 2005 riots coupled with the wave of arrests of suspected jihadists moved the question of Islam to the forefront of French concerns and gave new life to concerns about the threat of a Muslim world mobilised by political Islamism. Yet the opposite is true: paradoxically, it is the exhaustion of political Islamism, not its radicalisation, that explains much of the violence, and it is the depoliticisation of young Muslims, rather than their alleged reversion to a radical kind of communalism, that ought to be cause for worry. The key to minimising the risks of rioting and militant jihadism is to curb forms of state violence being exercised against predominantly Muslim, working-class neighbourhoods and to promote political participation by their residents."

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Regular readers will know I strongly oppose generalised boycotts of Israel - particularly from organisations that don't have boycott policies against other unethical regimes. I also reject the idea that Israel is an "apartheid state". I'm not going to rehearse the arguments here - my position is best articulated by my comrades over at Engage.

I do, however, support divestment from specific companies that are acting unethically in the Occupation, if this is part of a comprehensive international ethical policy. For this reason, I supported the Church of England's divestment from Caterpillar, even if I did not buy all of the reasoning behind it. So I'm not joining my fellow anti-anti-Zionists in their delight at the decision not to divest.